


Pigmented

by RunawayCaboose



Category: Sing Street (2016)
Genre: Colours, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 12:53:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10218605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayCaboose/pseuds/RunawayCaboose
Summary: Eamon had always seen people as colours, it was nothing special, nothing new, nothing extraordinary. It was just how he saw the world. And then came the boy who didn't have a colour and Eamon found solace.





	

Conor was not a colour.

That is a confusing place to start. Let’s back up, a few years at least.

Eamon loved colour, he always had. Maybe it had started when he got glasses when he was eight and he finally realized just how green leaves were and just how deep the sky was and just how magnificent everything was. Or maybe it was before that, when his small hands first graced pots of low-quality paint and smeared them across paper that wasn’t meant for painting on and the colours ran and ran and ran into each other, confused, muddled, until they seeped through the paper onto the table. Maybe even before that, when he was young, too young for him to remember, when he observed the world, saw the world for the first time and in his childlike gaze, he saw everything around him and yet, he saw nothing. Maybe there was no exact starting point for all of this, nothing concrete, nothing precise. Maybe it’s more abstract, everything is a beginning, nothing is an end, nothing is real and everything is so, so close to reality, just not quite there. Eamon tries not to think about this, not to analyze this, he overthinks everything and he’d just like to leave this be, let the game play out, let himself think without thinking about the thinking.  He can’t really help the association with colours, not really. It’s just something that happened, something that sprung up with his mom and his dad when he was young.

His mother, lavender, so light and so bright and so young. Her purple would only darken as they both age.

His father, emerald green. Deep and glassy, like rounded pieces of glass from bottles that wash up from the sea. Like the beer bottles his father had, when light would shine through them and project green on the wall and he, in childlike wonder and amazement and what have you, he would try to touch them, to grab them. He’d grow disappointed when he found that the colours did not run onto his skin like his paints, that they stayed firmly in place, protecting themselves, coating his hands and skin whenever he got too close. He didn’t mind that much, really. 

He spoke about the colours once, to his dad on one of his good days. Eamon wasn’t old yet, wasn’t old enough to understand the situation he was growing up in or what exactly he had working between his ears. He mentioned it offhandedly, something about the purple around his mother and his father yelled at him. ‘I’d never hit your mother, how dare you imply that I, you brat, worthless, insignificant, how dare you?’ It wasn’t exactly that, but it was like that, and that’s what Eamon heard as he shrunk back and covered his ears and told himself, chanted as a silent mantra, the colours were only for him, the colours were only for him. 

Darren, met when he was older, a teenager. Darren, despite what may have been expected, wasn’t a red. Eamon had never met someone so far from what red looked like. He was a blue, pale and soft and lapping waves in tidal pools. Darren wasn’t soft, or at least, he tried not to be, but Eamon couldn’t help what he saw and what he saw was blue. 

In between everything, his mother’s purple grew darker and his father’s green expanded, eating up their laughter and their happiness and consuming him until there was barely any left except for the green glass bottles. Physical manifestations of his father that Eamon had a hard time throwing away. 

Other people he met adopted colours, greys and other greens and other blues and reds and purples. The only person that didn’t have a colour was himself, his hands solely pale, no other shimmer of colour resting just on top of his skin, just above his veins and his bones. He felt strangely weak without a colour even though he knew they didn’t really serve any protection, but he felt abandoned. These colours were his, so why didn’t he have one? He didn’t like it. He tried to give himself a colour, but it never worked, nothing stayed, nothing stuck like those paints did, deep in the folds of his skin and creases in his hands. 

It was unfair.

And then he met Conor, pulled to his door by Darren, little boy blue. Conor didn’t have a colour, he was a blank slate, waiting to be written on. Eamon felt akin to this blank kid for just a second before remembering. These colours were his, Conor wouldn’t know about them, Conor wouldn’t feel something lacking every time he examined his face in the mirror, in fact, he’d never examine his face in the mirror and search for some sliver of colour, some tiny dot of false pigment. 

But Conor slipped into his life seamlessly, bringing noise and laughter and work that Eamon lost himself in. 

He tried to give Conor a colour once. It was green, cheerful green, happy green, smiling and grinning and soft grass green. But it made Eamon sick to see the way that the green tried to snake away from Conor, away from where he’d tethered it. And he realized that he was trying to replace his father’s green and that he should stop, let Conor’s colour come or never come, Conor was not his father, was not a replacement for his father, was too good to even be in the same hue as his father. The green disappeared from Conor and it was probably Eamon’s imagination, but Conor seemed happier. 

Raphina came, a yellow. Eamon never knew that yellows could look sad, but Raphina’s was and she wore it well, anointed on her brow, snaking around her wrists, smeared across her skin, barely visible. It was her colour, no doubt about it, her perfect brand of happy-sad that she worked so hard to cultivate in herself, to sow the seed of in others. 

Conor liked her a lot, anyone could tell, her yellow brushed off on his fingertips sometimes, but it never stayed. 

Eamon liked Raphina too, not as much as Conor, of course not, but she was nice and sweet and agreed to be in their music videos, so who was he to search for flaws in her?

Conor was at Eamon’s house, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to each other, scribbling things in a notebook and discussing chord progressions and suddenly, Eamon saw Conor’s colour.

It was well hidden and it was pale and it was faint, but there it was. Pale pink, beautiful, streaking across Conor’s cheeks and brows and falling into his hair and down his arms, just covering him, barely covering him. It was lovely, shimmering. Eamon kissed Conor, slow and warm and Conor’s pink melted onto Eamon’s skin and Eamon could feel it and he could tell that it didn’t belong, but it felt right at that moment. 

Conor left that night, said he couldn’t come over the next, he’d be out with Raphina. They didn’t talk about the kiss. After Conor left, Eamon stared at his hands. Colour started to form, small threads on his fingertips and knuckles. A deep green, glossy, glassy, just like his father, oh God, he was becoming his father. He plucked the small scraps of colour from where they were rooted in his skin and he tossed them away. Green wasn’t his colour, he wouldn’t let it be, he’d rather be blank than green. 

They never do talk about that shared kiss, the shared colour, but Eamon never regrets it. He doesn’t think Conor does either, they’re still friends, they still write music, they still talk, but they never talk about it.

Until Conor brings it up. ‘I liked it, you know. The kiss. I thought it was nice.’ Eamon nods along, unsure of what to say. ‘Raphina’s gone to London with her bloke. I don’t think she ever liked me as much as I liked her.’ Eamon just keeps nodding and Conor cups his face in his pink, pink hands and kisses him.

Eamon is confused and awestruck and after they break apart, when he touches his cheek where Conor held him, his hands come away pink.

Everything in his life becomes a lot more pink after that, rose tinged, rose tinted.

Eamon doesn’t have a colour of his own and he never has, but he’s more than content to be a canvas, collecting colours. Pink on his arms and face and underneath his chin, in spots and dashes and spills, it takes over him, like ink poured on paper. 

He is so warm under his patchwork quilt of colour, it is so full of holes, so ragged, but it clings to Eamon tightly and he is never worried about it slipping.

Pink is not his colour, but it is Conor’s, and Eamon can’t find a flaw with it spreading to him too, running onto him and trickling down his skin like paint, pigmented and perfect and pink. 

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in a very short amount of time while taking a break from another work, so i'm sorry if there are mistakes!! you can find me @ taptaptapping.tumblr.com if you want to chat or be friends or whatever, i'm down.


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